Editor’s note: This post was written by Kristi Kelly, a consultant at startups in New York City’s tech and entertainment industries and a writer at Fueled. Follow her on Twitter and Medium.

Google’s Inbox has officially been moved onto my smartphone home-screen, but there is just something off about the new mail app, which is billed as a supplement to Gmail. The first time I was asked what I thought of the new offering, my quick and passionate response was, “It sucks!” It didn’t actually suck, but I was resentful because I felt Google had let me down. Google let me down by being too big to be willing to fail.

I was an early invite to Google Inbox, getting it the first afternoon of launch thanks to contacts at Google. The app was downloaded onto my phone and awaiting my investigation when my fellows at the Fueled collective began to buzz their anticipation about the new app, as well as who had gotten an invite and who had not. I quickly read through the official Google blog’s introduction of Inbox, my excitement building for what I was beginning to believe would be a revolutionary move forward in email management. read more

That anger has culminated in both “Restore the Fourth” rallies across the U.S., outrange online and a great deal of mockery as people turn to humor to best express their feelings. The nation, and indeed the world, has also turned its attention to the flight of Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who originally leaked information about the program to the media.

But in the midst of the anger, lawsuits and questions, a larger conversation is taking place, one that revolves around privacy online, how much information we put out about ourselves on the Web and who has access to it.

That is because, while the Internet has certainly made our lives more convenient, it has also made them more trackable. In our bid to communicate better and easier, we put out so much information about ourselves, both intentionally and unintentionally, that the discovery of the NSA’s program may be as much a moment of reevaluation of our own practices as well as our government.

After all, for the government to collect the information it does, someone else has to have it first and the government is not the only entity with a vested interest in tracking you and monitoring your activities. read more

Cloud Computing is a buzzword that has been floating around the web over the past few years and certainly even the least tech-wise of us all have encountered the technology at some level. Whether it’s through the use of common web services or devices at your place of work. The technology is impossible to avoid and is now a critical component in our daily personal and business lives.

Cloud computing is leveraging the now much lower costs of internet bandwidth, hardware and network infrastructure to deliver network services to economies of scale. Essentially, pooling resources to deliver cost-effective internet-based services to businesses and for personal use. So technical implementations and services which cost hundreds and thousands of dollars a decade ago are now available for a few dollars per month.

So, are you leveraging the power of this ever-evolving technology? If not, here are 4 reasons why you should seriously consider. read more

When Google released their people widget it was believed to be a Rapportive “killer” but the company wasn’t having any of that talk and this week they decided to step up their game by adding Twitter integration to their social utility.

The company’s newly stepped up Twitter widget now allows users to follow their email contacts, send them Twitter replies and even retweet their contacts tweets right from inside their Gmail email messages, the program even allows users to see if their contacts are following them on Twitter.

Rapportive then goes one step further, integrating with the Twitter notification emails you get when you receive follows, mentions and direct messages.

In it’s most basic terms the program turns your Gmail account into a Twitter portal while maintaining the exact same Gmail functionality we have all come to expect from Google.

If you already have Rapportive you will receive the rollout in your inbox in the near future or you can head over to rapportive.com/twitter and download the program now. read more

On the Reddit blog today the social web sharing site announced that their [email protected] account had been hacked, adding that the account is used only for feedback e-mail, thus no confidential data was compromised. Reddit is now using [email protected] as their official e-mail for the time being.

Reddit released the following statement via their blog:

“We’re in contact with both google’s and twitter’s security team, and the site has not been broken into. All he’s done at this point is ruined everyone’s night. We don’t recycle passwords, and we don’t store passwords in the reddit email. No one’s account has been compromised. We don’t store any confidential information in that account; it is just for feedback email.”

The part about the team contacting Twitter was added because their official Twitter account was also compromised leading to fake Tweets being added to their account. The fake Tweets have now been removed.

While I like OpenID as a concept, I think it has been a bit too technical for the average user. Not that it is very hard to understand or use, but rather clunky and more of a hassle than something that truly helps out. There just wasn’t incentive enough for the user.

No more, potentially at least, because now Facebook is an OpenID relying partner. That means that you can use your Gmail account to login to Facebook, once you have authenticated it, and that in turn means that when you’re logged in to Facebook you’re also logged in to every site using Facebook Connect.

According to statistics, if you are reading this, you are probably on a broadband connection. Whether you are surfing at work on a LAN or at home on a DSL or cable modem, you are probably not on dial up at this moment.

However, there was a time not that long ago in which Webmasters were optimizing every element of their page feverishly to squeeze every ounce of speed from it. Broadband simply was not that common and, even over dial up connections, visitors had twitchy fingers on the “back” button at all times.

But in the age of YouTube, Flash ads and embeddable content, those lessons have been all but forgotten, However, not everyone has access to high-speed connection, especially in rural locations, and after spending just a few days limited to dial up, the lessons come flooding back.

So what lessons did I learn while surfing the slow Web while evacuated? Here is just a sample of what I saw. read more

Take a look at the comment below, caught by Akismet and held for moderation on a client blog I have access to, but not automatically marked as spam and removed when clicking the Check for Spam button. Why do I have to see it? What in this comment makes it even remotely possible to be a valid one?

Don’t get me wrong, Akismet is a great service, and it saves me a lot of time, as it does numerous others, but sometimes it amazes me what it lets through. And I’m not only thinking about the porn spam that litters most blogs’ moderation queues (or comment areas) should they have obtained some degree of traffic. read more

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans three years ago, I was stranded in the upstate of Louisiana without my most basic tools. I was there for several weeks with only dial-up Web access and a borrowed computer to help me out. Yet, I managed to update my online diary twice a day during my evacuation and continue to operate my then-newest site Plagiarism Today.

Now, three years later, I find myself in a similar position. As I am writing this, I am evacuated for Hurricane Gustav while tending to a new blog, Inelegant Solutions (see link above) and several older ones. I also have to worry about writing jobs and consulting work even though my computers and my files are mostly packed up.

However, this time around, I am better prepared. Not only was the evacuation more smooth, but I am better able to maintain my presence online despite barely being able to see the Web.

However, making that happen requires a great deal of preparation and taking several steps before anything happens. For bloggers who want to keep writing no matter what, I would strongly urge the following steps. read more

There’s no doubt about it, I’m in love with the cloud. Some people might not share my fascination with storage-in-the-cloud and compute-in-the-cloud models but I can’t wait to have the same computing experience regardless of the computer or device I’m using to connect to the Internet. I’ve taken it upon myself to change my workflow and digital lifestyle to get as much of my data online and make use of web-based tools until that utopian time comes. Here’s how I do it and you can do the same.